- Brazil: Supreme Court Justice Suspends Bill That Ordered Early Release of Ex-President Bolsonaro
Source: US News & World Report
“Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes prohibited the implementation of a sharp reduction in the 27-year prison sentence of former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, a court document showed on Saturday. Two Brazilian political parties and the press association ABI this week separately challenged the bill, which would have potentially freed Bolsonaro in 2028. Congress last month overturned President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s veto of the bill, but the plaintiffs asked Brazil’s top court to overturn it, saying the bill was unconstitutional.” (05/09/26)
- Pakistan: Fourteen cops killed in car bombing, shootout
Source: Reuters
“A car bombing at a police post in northwestern Pakistan followed by an ambush on police personnel rushing to the scene has killed at least 14 officers, police said on Sunday. Images from after the attack on Saturday showed the structure had been reduced to rubble, with bricks, charred wreckage and mangled vehicles scattered around the area. … A militant alliance known as the Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attack.” (05/10/26)
- Virginia Democrats to appeal ruling against redistricting to SCOTUS
Source: NBC 4 Washington
“After the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, Democratic lawmakers in the commonwealth notified the court they intend to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Friday’s ruling by the state supreme court delivered another major setback to the party’s nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections. Democrats, led by House Speaker Don Scott and Attorney General Jay Jones, filed a motion late Friday afternoon asking the state supreme court to pause its ruling from taking effect while they appeal for an emergency hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize mid-decade redistricting.” (05/08/26)
- Italy: Venice Biennale opens without a jury amid strife over Russian and Israeli participation
Source: Associated Press
“Geopolitical tensions spilled over into the Venice Biennale contemporary art exhibition, which opens its most chaotic and contested edition in memory Saturday with no Golden Lions after the jury quit in protest of Israel’s and Russia’s participation and loud protests outside their pavilions. … Ahead of the opening, protesters objecting to Israel’s participation clashed with police on Friday. Earlier in the week, feminist groups from Ukraine and Russia converged on the Russian Pavilion and Palestinians remembered artists killed in Gaza.” (05/09/26)
- Hantavirus-hit passengers begin to disembark cruise ship in Tenerife
Source: CNN
“Passengers have begun to disembark the cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak, Spain’s ministry of health said, in a carefully managed repatriation operation in Tenerife involving multiple nations. Since the vessel departed Argentina last month, the deaths of three people have been linked to hantavirus — a rare disease typically caused by exposure to infected rats’ urine or feces. It remains a low risk to the general public, according to the World Health Organization. The boat’s arrival had caused tensions in the Canary Islands, an autonomous community of Spain, with the territory’s leader Fernando Clavijo saying earlier in the week that he was opposed to the ship docking.” (05/10/26)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/10/health/live-news/hantavirus-cruise-outbreak
- Hobbes’s State: “Why Are You Hitting Yourself?”
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter“As kids we may remember the old trope — often seen on TV or in movies — where a stronger kid would overpower a weaker kid and use the weaker kid’s hands and arms to hit him, asking mockingly, ‘Why are you hitting yourself?’ Most adults would recognize this as illegitimate for obvious reasons: though the weaker kid’s hands are literally hitting him, he is obviously being coerced against his will, such that the stronger kid is the aggressor. While most adults would pride themselves on the ability to distinguish between external coercion and self-inflicted punishment, they often fail this when it comes to the state. In fact, this is the very core of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory — since the state represents the people by social contract, whatever the state does to an individual, that individual has consensually done it to himself.” (05/08/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/hobbess-state-why-are-you-hitting-yourself
- Ted Turner: 24 Hours That Changed The News World
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp“Since CNN’s launch, ‘the news’ has gone from short daily feeds covering pre-deadline events to 24/7/365 real-time coverage of far more things, in far more detail, by numerous and varied outlets. In theory, that should make the public much better informed than we used to be. We can know more OF what’s happened, and know more ABOUT what’s happened. In reality, I’m not sure our attention to important facts about important events has really increased. The 24-hour news environment seems far richer in sensationalism, pearl-clutching, and outrage bait than in useful information about the important stuff.” (05/09/26)
- Right-Wing Influencers Don’t Understand What Makes America Great
Source: Reason
by Stephanie Slade“The Dissident Right is furious with Neil Gorsuch for saying America is a creedal nation. That just goes to show how out of touch its obsessions are.” (05/09/26)
https://reason.com/2026/05/09/right-wing-influencers-dont-understand-what-makes-america-great/
- Iran war marks the end of American primacy as we know it
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Trita Parsi“The war in Ukraine shattered a core assumption about great-power dominance: that size and military strength are enough to impose one’s will. Ukraine showed otherwise. With the right strategy, geography, and resolve, a weaker state can survive and blunt — and in key respects even defeat — a much stronger adversary. The United States now faces an uncomfortable parallel. The war with Iran is exposing similar limits to American power. For decades, U.S. grand strategy has rested on primacy — the belief that America’s unmatched military capabilities enabled it to uphold global stability and shape outcomes across regions. After the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans have reached a stark conclusion: the cost of primacy is no longer sustainable — and no longer serves U.S. interests.” (05/08/26)
- Why the Scarcity of News about Our Increasing Abundance?
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman“If today, compared to the past, you need to work only half the time to earn the money for a television, in effect, you’ve acquired half of the television for free! (Actually, you’ve done better than that because it will be a better television.) And you have the time to acquire other things or enjoy leisure. This is more or less true for everyone whose society is amenable to freedom of enterprise, the division of labor, and world trade.” (05/08/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-abundance-keeps-increasing
- New York Times announces the end of the climate change hoax
Source: Fox News
by David Marcus“For almost the entirety of the half century I have lived on Earth, I have had experts, teachers, politicians and activists hectoring me about how climate change is going to destroy the planet. But this week, in The New York Times, of all places, is evidence that climate alarmism is finally cooling down.’Democrats Do Not Have To Campaign On Climate Change Anymore,’ blared the headline, this week, as author Matt Huber argues that voters are rather turned off by the subject. I would like to suggest that this is because it is the single most expensive lie in human history.” [editor’s note: I’d say the single most expensive lie in history is “the state is necessary” – TLK] (05/10/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/david-marcus-new-york-times-announces-end-climate-change-hoax
- Creators and Destroyers of Worlds
Source: Quillette
by Ian Nieves“Despite the dangers, we must seize the gifts bequeathed by existential dangers, since these amount to life in unprecedented abundance.” (05/09/26)
https://quillette.com/2026/05/09/creators-and-destroyers-of-worlds-ai-alignment-nuclear-war/
- No, Russia Isn’t Finished
Source: The American Conservative
by Leonid Ragozin“If you were exclusively on a mainstream Western media diet in recent weeks, you’d be excused for thinking that the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime now lies on its deathbed. Signs of ‘public discontent’ are all over the place, you see. Silicon-lipped beauty blogger Viktoria Bonya attacked the government on YouTube. So did the notorious Kremlin propagandist Ilya Remeslo, fresh from a stint at a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the former defense minister Sergey Shoygu might be plotting a coup, according to CNN. But if you talk to people inside Russia, as this author does on a daily basis, you’ll find them perplexed and doubting the West’s sanity upon hearing about this fresh bout of ‘Russia is finished’ sentiments.” (05/09/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/no-russia-isnt-finished/
- Meat Industry Price Fixer Sentenced to Make Money
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen“Three years ago, the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division sued a company called Agri Stats that should have made us all wonder what capitalism even means anymore. After all, is it a capitalist system when one company can get every participant in a market to give them proprietary information about inventory, production costs, pricing, and profit margins, allowing those participants to know exactly what their competitors are doing, enabling them to restrict supply or raise prices without consequences? The initial lawsuit against Agri Stats, which dealt in data for broiler chicken, turkey, and pork processors, described a collusion machine, complete with clip art of little stick figures pulling profits upward.” (05/08/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/05/08/meat-industry-agri-stats-department-of-justice-price-fix-trump/
- Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s “Big Retirement”
Source: Wired
by Steven Levy“Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of ‘its universal death sentence.’ That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. … His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the ‘solved world’ that comes if we get AI right.” (05/08/26)
- Non-profit group has twisted the meaning of “genocide” (and hijacked a Zionist hero’s name) to suit its own woke purposes
Source: New York Post
by Bethany Mandel“Few figures loom larger in the moral and legal history of the 20th century than Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the word ‘genocide’ after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. Lemkin witnessed the epitome of evil, and then gave the world the language to describe it. The word ‘genocide’ exists because he understood that what had been done to the Jewish people was so unprecedented that existing legal vocabulary could not define it properly. He spent the rest of his life ensuring that the world would never again lack the words — or the legal framework — to confront such crimes. That is precisely why what is happening now is so grotesque. The family of Raphael Lemkin is taking legal action against the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has hijacked his name and repurposed it for its own warped woke agenda.” (05/10/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/05/10/opinion/group-hijacked-a-zionist-heros-name-to-suit-its-woke-purposes/
- Britain Is Pricing Its Factories into Oblivion
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Ted Newson“At its peak, Britain was known as the workshop of the world. Sheffield produced high-quality steel, Manchester still had a strong textiles sector and the West Midlands was world-renowned for its cars. Glasgow, Sunderland and Newcastle were shipbuilding hubs, Stoke-on-Trent produced ceramics. … In the pursuit of lowering carbon emissions, Britain has abandoned its manufacturing sector. As we have artificially inflated energy prices through policy costs and made employing people harder, our industries have shifted to countries with more business-friendly environments. While rising comparative wage rates naturally encourage industry to shift overseas, the British government has further pushed industry away through deliberate choices. This has created job losses and regional decline as former manufacturing towns lose historic businesses.” (05/08/26)
https://fee.org/articles/britain-is-pricing-its-factories-into-oblivion/
- Guatemala’s step toward good governance
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff“Just over halfway into the term of Guatemala’s reformist leader, the ‘democratic spring’ that he and his Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) sought to nurture is sending up fresh shoots of hope for lawful governance. President Bernardo Arévalo has appointed a new attorney general, marking what he calls ‘a new chapter’ for the small Central American nation. The outgoing attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, had tried to derail Mr. Arévalo’s 2024 inauguration, and has since obstructed multiple efforts to promote judicial impartiality and transparency. To many Guatemalans, Ms. Porras’ tenure symbolized entrenched political impunity and corruption that used the power of the state to settle scores with perceived enemies and make allowances for allies. In 2022, the United States cited her for repeatedly undermining anti-corruption efforts to ‘gain undue political favor.'” (05/08/26)
- A Tale of Two Waiting Periods
Source: Independent Institute
by Stephen P Halbrook“The First and Tenth Circuits conflict on whether ‘cooling-off’ periods violate the text of the Second Amendment.” (05/08/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/08/a-tale-of-two-waiting-periods/
- The Big Apple’s Rotten Budget Move: Raiding Pensions for Short-Term Spending
Source: The Daily Economy
by Thomas Savidge“Delaying pension contributions may ease immediate pressure on New York City’s budget, but the shell game reveals deeper weaknesses in the city’s finances.” (05/08/26)
- What UCLA doesn’t want you to know
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Jessie Appleby“The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency. When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong. And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis. That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.” (05/08/26)
- Fountainhead Forum, episode 446
Source: Fountainhead Forum
“Adar Weinreb on the Israel-Palestine conflict.” (05/10/26)
https://rumble.com/v79n98s-ff-446-adar-weinreb-on-the-israel-palestine-conflict.html
- The Brian Nichols Show, 05/10/26
Source: Lions of Liberty
“I Asked A 27-Year Doctor Why WebMD Is Making You SICKER.” (05/10/26)
https://www.lionsofliberty.com/episodes/tbns-i-asked-a-27-year-doctor-why-webmd-is-making-you-sicker
- System Update, 05/08/26
Source: System Update
“Iran’s Strategy in the Strait of Hormuz, Fighting Journalists, Animal Rights, and More.” (05/08/26)
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/glenn-reacts-irans-strategy-in-the
- In the Tank, episode 535
Source: Heartland Institute
“Innovation vs. Dystopia.” (05/09/26)
https://heartland.org/podcasts/innovation-vs-dystopia-in-the-tank-podcast-535/
- Bulwark Takes, 05/08/26
Source: The Bulwark
“Courts Keep Rejecting Trump’s Tariffs.” (05/08/26)
- Free Talk Live, 05/09/26
Source: Free Talk Live
“Is AOC’s room clean? :: Cop blocks woman from her driveway :: ‘We know you live here’ :: AI that self destructs so it can’t do damage :: Stores letting you steal until it hits a felony amount :: Project Mockingbird on the internet with streamers :: AOC to become God queen of the aliens after UFO file drop? :: Gov wants more ID to start in the US for getting a sim card :: Tracking private jets to avoid nukes :: Giant data center in Utah :: 2026-05-09 Hosts: Bonnie, Riley O’Bill, Angelo.” (05/09/26)
- The Kyle Anzalone Show, 05/09/26
Source: Libertarian Institute
“Jim Webb: Hegseth Lashes Out at Congress, Admits Truth About Iran War.” (05/09/26)